Heartwarming And Heart-wrenching Real-Life Dramas Come To HBO/HBOMax Press Tour 2022

By Delaina Dixon | February 16, 2022 | Entertainment

HBO’s newest slate of series focuses on real-life people and incidences that will tug at your heartstrings.

We Own This City

The executive team from The Wire returns to Baltimore to tell the story of cop corruption in this Maryland address. The six-hour, limited series chronicles the rise and fall of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force. In 2017, eight members of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a unit within the Baltimore City Police Department (BPD), were charged with racketeering, robbery, extortion, and overtime fraud. All were found guilty. British actress Wunmi Mosaku plays Nicole Steele, an investigator on the case. “I felt like Nicole was the audience — the public,” she shares. “When you hear a story–like a real-life story like this–you ask, ‘How and why?’ Nicole is basically trying to figure out how and why, how could this happen, and how do we stop it?”

Director and executive producer Reinaldo Marcus Green explains why this series is so important to bring to light. “what’s so special is that we have a chance to really have a meaningful conversation about all of these issues,” he begins, as his young son hops into his lap. “This is who we’re doing the show for, guys. It’s the next generation after us for us to protect.” Jamie Hector and Darrell Britt-Gibson also star as Det. Sean M. Suiter and Jemell Rayam, respectively.

Premiere Date: April 25 at 9 pm ET on HBO

Juila

The life of Julia Child is reexamined in this mini-series, as we see how the acclaimed chef made her way to her long-running television series The French Chef, in this MaxOriginal comedy series. Brittany Bradford plays Alice Naman, a Black woman working at the network who sees Julia’s authenticity and why people will gravitate to her. “You don’t get to hear a lot about Black producers at this time — they were around,” Bradford shares. “Getting a chance to learn about who Alice could have been and the Alices of the world and then getting an opportunity to interact with Julia, they’re two women that are going through life and working in completely different ways but they are complementary towards one another.

Premiere Date: March 31 on HBOMax

The Survivor

This HBOOriginal unfolds the incredible true story of Harry Haft who was forced to box for his life in the Auschwitz prison camps during the Holocaust. His will to survive is driven by his quest to reunite with the woman he loves. Ben Foster stars in the title role. “I watched thousands of hours — thousands of hours– of Holocaust survivor interviews, spending time with Yiddish experts, learning about this world, the responsibility to honor survivors,” he shares. “It is an investigation of a time and place of people dealing with trauma, and that trauma is something we can speak to today.”#WBWD Billy Magnussen, who plays Haft’s cruel German captor Schneider, vocalized why it’s so important to bring light to the most horrid stories of our past. “The resilience of the human spirit… what Ben Foster brought to the character … It’s been astonishing to see the human spirit come through. Ben has profoundly impacted my life, and I learned so much from [showrunner] Barry Levinson and Ben on those days and sitting with this stain on history we have. It was just profoundly impactful, and I’ll never be the same man again after doing this film.”

Premiere Date: April 27 at 8 pm ET in honor of Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) on HBO

photo credit: HBO, Max Originals